Hundreds... and I still have them all.

Back in the day I didn't have much money, so these magazines were the cheapest legal means to get them. And they often had pretty good, if somewhat old, stuff. StarCraft, Desperados, Screamer 4x4, I-War 2...

If anyone interested here is complete list of full versions included with magazine Breja is talking about. It's pretty impressive. Fallout in '99 and Fallout 2 in '00 were if I'm not mistaken even commented abroad as this costed approximately 3 USD or something.

Dozens, maybe hundreds. Me and my cousin, even my father used to buy SCORE, LEVEL and Gamestar, all of them including full games. Now, only my cousin has a LEVEL subscription and has most of the issues they ever came out. He's just missing a few of the first years. And I still ocassionally check SCORE, what games they currently have (only Steam codes sadly).

Current status:
Gamestar has been dead for a long time.

LEVEL is still coming out, but no longer includes free games and is slowly veering away from being an exclusively game review magazine. But at around the time before they stopped including games, they also tried running Steam codes. That's why I have Serious Sam 3 or the entire King's Bounty series in my Steam library, among other things.

SCORE is pretty much unchanged, except instead of offering anywhere from 1-4 full games on disc every month, now it's codes on Steam for 1-4 full games every month.

There were also a couple other minor magazines, including some for kids (ABC), that also sometimes included a game. Most notably, I got XIII and The I of the Dragon from that one.

But we (my cousin and I) have tons of full games on discs thanks to this. Stuff like Gruntz, International Rally Championship, Loki, Armies of Exigo and a ton of other stuff not on GOG. Proud to say, I already played a very large portion of those and is also contributing to the fact, that I will always have a disc drive in my PC (along with hundreds of my boxed games :P).

PC Format in the UK went through a stage of featuring bikini models on their front cover (ironically, under a previous editor, they had run a highly preachy article about the dangers of online pornography...) but these were dropped (the models, not the bikinis you pervs! ;) ) - it is still running, and last time I checked an issue it was pretty good on technical info.
There was a PC Player magazine n the UK also which ran for 12 issues before folding - it made a feature of not having any coverdisks but costing less instead. It focused on more complex games (flight simulators, creation simulators, RPGs) including a series on making the most of Domark's Flight Sim Toolkit (a complex program for creating your own flight simulator, including model, aerodynamic, cockpit and world editors).
If you haven't done so already, a visit to RetroPDFs may be in order, with torrents of magazines covering Sinclair, BBC, Amstrad, Dragon, Amiga, Atari ST and other micros from the '80s and '90s...

It definitely was a thing in Germany.
I still have some 200+ CDs/DVDs containing (often several) full games from different gaming mags.
Many "classics" among them (considered by today's standard).

Thanks. Yeah, I have some of the speech mags from back then. I pick them up when I see them so will look at the link.

I only owned two or three issues of such magazines myself, most probably because they were given away as a free sample somewhere, but that's how I played and still remember e.g. Meat Puppet, due to a demo on those accompanying CD-ROMs. I don't have any full games still waiting for me to play from those CDs though.

But your post reminded me that I used to do something really geeky back in the days; I didn't have much chances of getting my hands on any good games back then or even on those magazines, but I was so hooked on videogames that I would often borrow old gaming magazines from the youth section of our library, just skimming through them, taking in names and looking at screenshots, sometimes reading the according reviews if they looked interesting, even though I knew I would most likely not get to play any of these games. That's how I learnt of many games from the 90's without having played them myself (well apart from the ones that I played at my friends' houses), and later I would remember some of those titles and look for them, also here on GOG.

I do, for example, recall reading about Betrayal at Krondor in the 90's, and decades later I bought it from GOG, although I have never actually played it so far, so in that sense I do have a backlog of such games, too. XD

I still hope to buy Star Trek TNG: A Final Unity here one day, a game I clearly remember reading a review of, and never yet had a chance to play.

And yeah, just like you I remember reading about a great many games, many I never got my hands on. Games were super expensive, and some hard or impossible to come by, even by illicit means of piracy. Reading about them was as good as it was going to get, then in the late 90s some could be at least tasted by playing demos from those CDs over and over. I know this absolutely nostalgia talking and not anything rational, but part of me misses how special games would feel back then, when some could only be glimsped like that through a printed review or maybe a short demo. These days I have a backlog, a wishlist of games avilable for purchase at any time over a hunder itmes long, and while I wouldn't really want to go back, it does all feel far less... special.

Interestingly, once we moved into the PC era, free cover games stopped being a thing in the UK. I always remember going to Germany, France or Spain and being amazed that full PC games (like Seven Kingdoms, EF2000 etc) were just given away on magazine covers.

We used to have it - with things like the Amstrad and Spectrum, but that was all I remember.

One of the best adventures I've ever played, and one of the best Star Trek games too. Perfectly captures the spirit of TNG.

I guess it's in licence hell, but it'd be really awesome to have it here. Would instabuy, and probably a handful of gift codes too.

I had a reputation of being a walking game encyclopedia (at least for Amiga and PC games), just from reading all those magazines and fantasising about playing them... I did have a computer and actually quite a few games, but since I didn't have much money and a "no-pirate" rule I could only get so many...

I still have a few dozen kilograms of gaming magazines from 1989 to the late 90s in the attic. And I occasionally take a few from those boxes and read them again (some of them come apart badly though).

That's amazing for a kid (assuming you were one at the time). Exchanging pirated copies was pretty common among classmates (and also the only reason why I knew games like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, I guess), and I didn't really have any moral thoughts about it back then, but I was stuck with an Atari ST with high resolution monochrome monitor (which was bad for gaming), so most of my games were Public Domain / freeware amateur games. I guess all that explains why I'm not only open to retrogaming but to indiegames, modding and freeware as well. And collecting. I loved to check out those old shareware CDs with hundreds of trash games at my friends', always hoping to find a few hidden gems among them. :D

*nods* Way back in the day, well before the period of full games, when there was heavy competition between multiple gaming magazines (Computer Games, PC Games, Level, XtremPC) and people picking their "team", I was fully with Computer Games... Which also vanished way back then, had no idea what was going on, sent my dad to look wherever he went to other areas of the city, he asked around for months, was just getting told that nope, no issue for that month was available (bar in one place, where the seller cheerfully produced a magazine... the last one which had been released, a few months old at that point, fortunately dad noticed and didn't buy it again).
But then I got internet access, could look things up, found their forum and became really active there, ended up creating their IRC channel too when one of their guys for some reason had his request rejected, managed it for a while until handing it over, and then vanishing off the forum too when I was too messed up to handle much of any interaction anymore.
Anyway, basically I just had that handful of Computer Games issues, didn't switch to another after that, and I seem to recall looking through some Chip too, but just a few issues and maybe not even purchased, just seen at someone else or borrowed, can't recall. Then there were just those 3 issues of Level won on that site in 2004 (or maybe one of them was at the start of 2005?) and those four I bought just for the full games they came with, Two Worlds 2 in 2012, the others in 2010.
As for legal purchases... Here? Back then? What was that? :))

Well, the full games that came with the magazines were "legally purchased" :P. Though I guess even that was a gray area, since most of the pre-internet stuff that required no activation or connection of any sort could be at least "borrowed" by others if not also copied. You can't really have expected eastern European kids to have any form of cash back then - I mean it happened, but it was very rare. Knowing someone with a CD-writer made you one of the "cool kids".

I think I still have one or two issues of "Computer Games" in a box somewhere. Sadly, I had to throw away most of my magazine collection due to... well, life, let's just say, but you never lose the memories. Not until you grow old and forget your own name as well, at least :P.

Another great thing about those old magazines: they're a wonderful resource for all manner of games that were in development but never saw the light of day. Some of the screenshots/videos to found in the books and discs would be very difficult to find today online, if not impossible.

Three that come to mind:
- Y-project : some kind of sci-fi fps where there was science based, and military based weapons.
- Some kind of Dune mmo rts
- Warcraft 3 before it became an RTS

Well in the mid-nineties I wasn't a kid anymore. But I didn't have much money (university student...). Living on cheap spaghetti and tomato source to be able to buy gaming mags or budget games wasn't uncommon for me. When I had money from birthdays or other occasions, I treated myself to something blacklisted from the backroom of the local store - and of course these games were never discounted and took quite a chunk out of my wallet. Still proud to have those boxes.